The backlash across Europe to a surging tide of refugees is an opportunity for Australia

Angela Merkel threw open Germany’s doors to refugees half a year ago in a moment of national exuberance. Germans went to the railway stations to welcome exhausted Syrians with flowers.

“If Europe fails on the question of refugees,” said the chancellor, “then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.” The polls showed public opinion on her side. More than a million refugees entered Germany last year.

Merkel, who was born into repressive East Germany and understands the plight of people fleeing tyranny, was confident.

There was some public anxiety, anger. Assaults of refugees flared. The number of arson and other attacks on asylum seeker accommodation soared to 1,005 last year, a fivefold increase on the year before. Merkel appealed for a solution across all of the European Union governments but held firm: “Germany is a strong country,” she said. “We can handle this.”

New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne marked a turning point in the debate.

The crowd of about 1,000 men who made co-ordinated sexual assaults on women at Cologne railway station generated 560 formal complaints to the police that night.

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An internal police report said: “Women, accompanied or not, literally ran a ‘gauntlet’ through masses of heavily intoxicated men that words cannot describe.”

Most of the assailants, according to a senior German official, Ralph Jaeger, were Arab or North African. Some were newly arrived. One reportedly told the German police: “You can't touch me. I'm Syrian: Merkel wants me here.”

Alan Posener wrote in Britain’s Observer newspaper: “German railway stations were symbols of Willkommenskultur [welcome culture], with crowds welcoming refugees from Syria and elsewhere. Now a station has become a symbol for what some are calling Islamic ‘rape culture’.”

News emerged of similar, co-ordinated attacks on the same night in Austria, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden.

Coming after the Paris terrorist attacks last November conducted mostly by immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, these attacks seemed to vindicate the anti-immigration parties and the far-right demagogues.

A backlash is under way. The polls have reversed. Most Germans now oppose Merkel’s stance, and over 60 per cent say the country has too many refugees already.

The general secretary of Merkel’s own party, the Christian Democratic Union, Peter Tauber, has called for 1000 refugees to be deported every day.

And on the weekend the leader of another German political party said that the police should shoot asylum seekers to stop them entering Germany, if that’s what it takes.

The head of the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, Frauke Petry, said that the police must stop refugees crossing into Germany from Austria: “I don't want this either. But the use of armed force is there as a last resort.”

She was condemned by other political leaders, but her remarks show how the far right is capitalising on public fear and anger. Merkel has taken a tougher line, saying that refugees who break the law will be deported. She now faces rising opposition in her own party and across Europe.

Across the continent, attitudes have hardened, fences have been built, laws toughened. Germany, Austria, France, Sweden and Denmark have all suspended the Schengen zone system of free movement across borders.

Central Europe's response has been harsh - the "Visegrad group" of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic has been unified in opposing any move to liberalise immigration laws. But xenophobic and far-right parties across Europe are on the rise.

The refugee flow, says Merkel, may be Europe’s “next great project”, but it is Europe’s present great crisis.

“It’s always been that nation states have finite boundaries that they defend in some form,” says James Jupp, an immigration expert at Australian National University.

“That’s broken down in the EU, which means that the European community starts to break down.”

But it’s also much wider than a European phenomenon. There is no precedent since World War Two for the number of displaced people in distress and seeking haven.

“We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, said last year.

His commission said that the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 was 59.5 million, an increase of over 8 million in one year. It compares to 37.5 million a decade earlier.

One way of conceiving the scale of the problem – one in every 122 people on the planet is a refugee in her own country or abroad. “If this were the population of a country, it would be the world's 24th biggest,” the UNHCR said.

Syria is the biggest new source of refugees, but in the last five years 15 wars have started or resumed, eight in Africa, three in the Middle East, plus the Ukraine crisis in Europe and three in Asia – in Kyrgyzstan, and in parts of Myanmar and Pakistan.

In the face of this rising tide of distressed and displaced people, attitudes everywhere are hardening. It’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s very first policy announcement in declaring his bid for the presidency was his proposal to wall off Mexico.

Australia, by hardening its borders to refugees two years ago, has been largely immune to the latest global upsurge in asylum seekers.

The Coalition’s boat turnback policy was harsh, ugly and effective, so effective that Labor has now adopted it too. Because of this, Australia is now in a position to make measured responses from a position of strength, by gradually increasing its refugee intake and helping alleviate the greatest human suffering since the Second World War.